It’s not long since the federal election, with the narrow return of the Liberal-National coaltion to governance, the Labour party gaining a lot of new seats, and a number of new faces and independents appearing on the horizon.

We’ve got Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton fighting tooth and nail to become the next president of the United States, and of course, we have the Olympic Games in Rio with hundreds of athletes vying for the top spots in their respective fields.

Obviously, only one will actually take the gold in every contest, but does that mean that all the others have failed? I think not.

As I ponder the meaning of success, I am challenged to look at the bigger picture and salute all those who have taken the time, the energy, the courage and conviction to have a go.

Someone once described being successful as doing the best you can with what you’ve got at any given moment.

It’s only when we succumb to temptation – turn to cheating, lying, using underhand ways and means that the waters get murky and truth and justice lose their prominence.

One can only hope that the Royal Commissions into child abuse and the maltreatment of children in the Northern Territory Correctional Centres will be a success in every meaning of the word.

Sadly, we can’t use the term success in the context of refugees and asylum seekers and the so called “Stop the boats” plans.

At a personal level, we each need to ponder what we call success, and its opposite – failure, in our own daily lives.

We don’t need to be gold medallists – or silver or bronze for that matter, but the best human being we can be in the situation we find ourselves.

I WISH to Correct Cyril Smith’s assertions that I thought that Suma Park Dam was unsafe.

I was only following council’s comments and proposed restrictions on having building restricted below Suma Park Dam as reported in your paper “due to the danger of the wall collapsing”.

My main concern was to clear the creek below the dam so the water could flow in the creek bed and not spread out over the paddocks as it has done recently with normal rain.

Cyril: I did not have to go back to 2012, I went back a couple of days and council’s most recent statement.

I AM puzzled and somewhat amused by the ongoing arguments about the drawbacks of digital versus paper forms in the census.

Irrespective of how the information is submitted the decision to store data for four years has been taken. But that does not seem to be the target of discussion. Information submitted in paper form will be handled by a human being for transfer into the system. Thereafter it will be processed exactly the same way as when transferred electronically.

Paper form information is, thus, seen by a person before storage; not so the electronic information which is transferred in a highly encrypted form from you directly into the ABS computer.